Bingo. I think it's widely unappreciated (even in China) that China's entire educational system is only thirty years old. During Mao's rule, all the schools w

Bingo. I think it's widely unappreciated (even in China) that China's entire educational system is only thirty years old. During Mao's rule, all the schools were shut down while teachers and intellectuals were denounced, sent to labor camps, imprisoned, and killed. When they started up again in 1978, they were effectively starting from nothing. It's frakkin' hard to bootstrap an educational system, especially for over a billion people. It takes educated people to produce educated people, and there just aren't enough educated teachers to go around. The situation is slowly getting better, but it's certainly not improving fast enough to stamp out millions of high quality graduates. The problem is compounded by Chinese pedagogy, which has a "Moses down from the mountain" flavor to it. If your teacher gives you bad or incomplete information, then you're stuck with that. Both critical thinking and autodidactic learning are almost entirely unknown. The Chinese government should be given credit for recognizing the importance of education, but I think this time their reach has really exceeded their grasp. China is going to have to scale back its expectations, and that process will be shockingly painful.